The proliferation of IP addresses and growing routing table sizes is addressed, among a variety of other approaches, by separating address spaces of end systems and network core. End point addresses in end system address spaces are called end point identifiers (EID) or edge addresses, core addresses in the core network address space are called routable addresses, routing locators (RLOC) or transit addresses. Transitions between address spaces may be handled by tunneling (e.g. encapsulation) or address translation. Both mechanisms may require related mapping tables in the transition gateway devices.
Internet routing and a related addressing architecture may face challenges in scalability, multi-homing, and interdomain traffic engineering. One issue may reside in overloaded semantics of the IP addresses that represent both the identity of the hosts as well as the location of the hosts. However, overloaded addressing semantics has contributed to the rigidity of the Internet architecture by coupling application entities, transport and network protocols and the routing together. This rigidity shows up in a number of operational matters, e.g. renumbering of sites or even hosts is difficult, and may be considered something to be avoided by the network administrators; the amount of state information to be stored in the routing system grows faster than the number of hosts, thus causing routing scalability problems.
In consideration of the above, according to the example of the present invention, methods, apparatuses, a related computer program product and a data structure for distributed storage of service provision-related information are provided.
In this connection, the example of the present invention enables one or more of the following:                Enabling reuse and caching of the mappings, thus reducing the mapping resolution signaling;        Enabling also the first packet of a new connection already having mapping information in the cache of the local gateway to avoid resolution delay experienced by the earlier session that had to proceed through the resolution process;        Avoiding costly signaling, as the mapping information may also include additional information beyond the address mappings such as priority and weight;        Reusability of mapping information that was earlier obtained but purged later on from the cache, but is now requested for the new connection;        Avoiding a penalty of resolving the mapping information even if it was cleaned out from the current cache entries;        Avoiding consumption of local access link capacity due to state transfer between the host and the gateway;        Coping with a need being that hosts may communicate frequently with a certain set of host by making this set of frequently contacted hosts available beforehand to the serving entity;        Enabling the serving entity to resolve the mappings before the mappings are actually needed, thus improving the end user experience e.g. in case of mobile served entities that are changing their serving entity;        Enabling an independent software/firmware upgrade of the serving entity and/or the served entity, e.g. enabling the serving entity to cope with a legacy served entity.        